1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer system maintenance and diagnostics and more particularly to computer system failure reporting mechanisms for reporting system failure to a remote site.
2. State of the Art
Much of the world's day-to-day business relies on sophisticated computer systems used in such fields as finance, securities exchange, telecommunications, medicine, and retailing. Reliability and maintainability are vital concerns in such applications, since any down time may result not only in tremendous inconvenience but also significant monetary loss. Vendors of such computer systems have therefore developed maintenance and diagnostic facilities as part of the computer system and have established customer assistance centers to provide customer support. When a system failure occurs, diagnostic software tries to determine the cause of the failure and sends analysis results to the customer assistance center. In the prior art, reporting mechanisms of the type described have typically been required to run under the computer operating system, such that if a failure occurs, the system must be able to be successfully rebooted before failure reporting can be performed. To ensure that the system can be successfully rebooted, redundant boot paths have been provided. That is, multiple independent copies of the operating system have been stored on different storage devices independently accessible by the computer system such that if the operating system cannot be reloaded from one of the storage devices, then it may hopefully be reloaded from another of the storage devices. Despite such precautions, failures do occur that prevent the system from being successfully rebooted. In order to minimize down time, a mechanism is needed for reporting such failures. Such a mechanism would allow a "dead" system to "call home"; that is, allow a system that cannot be successfully rebooted to send a report to a remote service center.